Victor III Agraught
Victor III was the twenty-sixth monarch of Daravia. He helped Daravian government remain stable in the wake of the aristocracy's disempowerment. Early life Victor was born to Steppen Agraught in 532, only a matter of months before he ascended the throne as Steppen IV. By the time of the Rubinai Revolution, when it became apparent how much political power Steppen had allowed himself to cede to the parliament, Victor was only nine, and so he had little familiarity with the traditional scope of royal power. As he grew into adolescence, Victor came to appreciate royalty as simply the life of an independently wealthy bachelor, and as he prepared to take the crown he decided to become a major host of banquets. Reign In 549, Steppen abdicated, and Victor almost immediately held a long and lavish coronation gala. This was not simply a hedonistic move; Victor used the opportunity to garner a sense of what people wanted, and he later visited Council Premier Baldwin Crackstone to bring up those concerns to him. By these means, Victor and Baldwin forged a close relationship— Victor continued throwing feasts, and using them as an opportunity to remain politically active. In 552, Tiberius Barring succeeded Baldwin as the Council Premier, and proved much less willing to accommodate Victor's continuing involvement in the parliament. Frustrated by Tiberius' stonewalling, Victor left Castleton entirely in 553 and began touring Daravia. Victor visited each of the duchies of Daravia in turn, hoping to meet with feudal aristocrats and determine a path forward for their increasingly politically irrelevant class. By the later 550s, Victor had concluded that the nobility would need to give up on policymaking and instead become cultural powerhouses, and consequently he began promoting arts patronage. Victor's particular point of interest was documentary preservation; in 563, he ordered the building of the Ardemaust Wunduriasi (Grand Archives) to preserve parliamentary meeting minutes and legal documents. Victor also helped improve Golden Quintet recordkeeping during this era. Once his major archival projects were stable, Victor expanded into academia, seeking to fund secondary schools and universities. During much of his reign, Victor let his youthful tendency to host parties subside, but in his later years he returned to that interest. In the 580s and 590s, he held a wide variety of lavish dinners for various scholars and aristocrats, in a hope to maximize his knowledge and that of his court. In 598, he had even begun planning a great gala for his 50th year of reign, but early in the planning process Victor suffered a stroke and died. Personal life Victor was reluctant to marry in the early years of his reign— due to his frequent banquets, he met with many of the bachelorettes in the aristocracy, but didn't connect strongly with any of them. Instead, Victor met Branda Harkener in Corolis in 554, and the two were quickly infatuated. Their courtship drew negative attention from the nobility, since Harkener was from a poor parliamentary family, but Victor and Branda nevertheless married in 555. The couple had three daughters; the eldest, Geraldine, was born in 557. Victor remained closely involved in the raising of his daughters, hoping to instill academic passion in them, and Branda shared that goal; to further that goal, Branda funded the creation of a women's university in the 560s, which all three of the couple's daughters would ultimately attend. Category:Daravians Category:Agraught Family Category:Monarchs